I am a web-surfing multi-tasker. For example, I currently have 7 tabs in this
Firefox window and 5 more tabs in 2 other firefox windows going simultaneously. When I mean "going", I mean they are usually queued up for me too read.
So, I will go to a site like
digg.com and I will Ctrl-Click the links I want to read and they all load in background tabs. I will then subsequently do this with any links in the pages I read. I will also look up topics or definitions of words with a double-click (highlight the word), right-click, "s" (Search Google For 'word'). This, again loads another tab.
Anyway, so I frequently hop from one tab to another and Alt-Tab between Firefox windows, since I categorize a full "session" represented by a single window. For example, I will have one that is my "email" window. I will have tabs for McKearney.com email,
Gmail,
Myspace (kind of email-ish), etc.
All this said, I obviously bounce around. So, when I leave one page to look at another, I often need a place-holder to show where I was. So, I double-click a word to highlight it. This way, when I come back, my place is held. In comes the
New York Times (among others).
So, the New York Times recently made it off of my shit list because they decided to stop requiring registration just to read the news. Well, they very quickly made it back on the list because they added this "helpful" feature for people. If you double-click any text on the entire page, they take the highlighted text and search for a definition for you and pop up a lovely window with it, without asking you if you want it. Nice.
I first toyed with the idea of using
Greasemonkey to add an additional "Are you sure you want to look this up?" question, but I quickly realized that I would never answer that question with a "yes". So, I looked at the source HTML for the web page. It begins with this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<script src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/article/articleShare.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/Tacoda_AMS_DDC_Header.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/fileit.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/DropDown.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/modifyNavigationDisplay.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/util/tooltip.js"></script>
I bolded the line that caught my eye... this one is the culprit, so I decided to use
Adblock Plus (which is usually used to block images) to block that URL. So, I fired up the Adblock Plus configuration and added "http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js" to the list. I reloaded the page and... voila! No more obnoxious "oh, you meant to look up the meaning of 'the'.." logic.
This doesn't get the NY Times off of my shit list, since they did it in the first place, but it at least makes it tolerable if I want to view something on their site.
One note: This only works for the NY Times, obviously. So, I will probably have to figure this out again with another site. It may require Greasemonkey. Either way, I don't care. I'm the one in control of my web browsing, not you!